You wanna be a Amazon Best Seller?
Well, everyone's a Amazon Best Seller.
They have thousands of categories.
Today, I'm gonna teach you guys
how to become a New York Times best-selling author.
(peaceful music)
Some of you know this about me, and some of you don't;
but I co-authored a book called Hustle.
We hit the New York Times Best Seller list
not once, but three times in a row.
If I can do it, and I have terrible grammar and writing;
that means you too can do it as well.
Here's how you do it:
First, you gotta sell a shit load of copies.
If you sell a lot of copies in the first week,
you're more likely
to hit the New York Times Best Seller list.
But you know what?
It's hard to sell a lot of books all at once.
But here's the thing that they don't tell you.
If you sell books a year in advance, all of those book sales
count for your first week.
If you sell a lot of books,
it all counts to your first week.
So pre-sell as many books as you can.
Don't just sell them online,
you gotta sell 'em in bookstores like Barnes & Nobles,
you gotta sell 'em in Amazon,
you gotta sell 'em to corporations.
You need to sell 'em to everyone,
'cause they're also looking
at who's just selling books on Amazon.
If everyone just sells books only on Amazon,
they're gonna be like,
"hmm, they're probably gaming the system
"and doing something just for Amazon."
But if someone's selling books on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles,
local bookstores at the college, what are they gonna think?
"Oh, wow, this book is really popular.
"It deserves to be on the New York Times Best Seller list."
The next thing that they don't tell you
is it's all discretionary.
If they want you to be on the Best Seller list, you will;
and if they don't,
even if you sell a lot of copies, you won't.
So make sure you have a good publisher.
I know that's gonna hurt for a lot of you guys
who are trying to self-publish,
but if you self-publish, you're pretty much shit outta luck.
You need a really good publisher.
If you have a well-known name backing you,
even if they don't give you a lot of money
or they don't give you a lot of perks;
it's still worth it
'cause that's gonna increase your odds of succeeding.
The next thing you wanna do is create a ton of press.
If people see a lot of press with the book sales,
it's much more believable.
If they don't, it's not as believable.
Here's the thing that they don't tell you,
and here's how I really hit
the New York Times Best Seller list.
It's actually two things that I did.
You need a lot of corporate book sales.
I don't care if you're selling to consumers or businesses,
you need a lot of book sales.
The easiest way to get that is from other businesses
or conferences, assuming you're a paid speaker.
If you can get 'em to buy in bulk,
you're much more likely to hit.
The reason Hustle hit isn't because I have
a big social media following.
It's because I hit up a lot of big businesses
and I traded services.
I said, "Hey, I will do your marketing
"in exchange for you to buy $100,000 worth of books."
I did that five times.
That means I pre-sold $500,000 worth of books
to companies by doing a trade of services.
You guys have heard of the name Gary Vaynerchuk?
Well, who hasn't?
Do you know how he hits the New York Times Best Seller list
a lot of the times?
When he goes to conferences and speaks,
he's getting them to buy books.
Before he has a new book that's coming out,
a lot of these conferences are buying his book,
and that helps him hit the New York Times Best Seller list.
The second part of that trick that I told you,
that really helped me,
is we use a company called Result Source.
What I didn't know is you can also do this
by just hitting up Barnes & Nobles,
and all the major book suppliers.
What they do is they take all your pre-sell money,
and they take that money and they distribute it
to Barnes & Nobles, and Amazon, and a lot of random places;
so it seems legitimate and, quote-unquote, natural.
So the New York Times believes it's all natural,
and then you hit the list;
and you can hit it multiple weeks in a row.
What these companies do is,
they don't just release the books all at once,
'cause New York Times is catching on.
They release it over a period of a few weeks,
'cause you can hit the weekly list and the monthly list.
If you wanna hit the list,
don't have all your book sales hit right away.
Make 'em spread out.
Here's the caveat,
and here's what most people won't be telling you;
you probably wanna hit
the New York Times Best Seller list because you think
it's gonna get you higher speaking fees,
it's gonna make your career, you're gonna do really well.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
It didn't do much for me.
I didn't get higher speaking fees.
I didn't get more traffic to my website,
and my business didn't grow.
My book wasn't related to marketing,
and I do believe that's part of the reason
on why I didn't do that well financially from the book.
I did get a half a million dollar advance
to write the book, though; which was nice.
But if I wrote a book that was similar
to my main core profession,
even if that meant I couldn't sell as many copies
and hit the New York Times Best Seller list,
I would have done better financially,
or at least that's what I feel;
and that's what other authors who have hit the list
or have written books have also told me.
The other thing that I've learned as I co-authored the book.
I love my co-authors,
but you should write a book under your name
and no one else's name.
It should just be you by yourself; because it'll do
much better for your career.
Of course, if you're just starting off,
I do believe it'll help you a lot more than it helped me
because I've been in my career for over 16 years.
I'm, already getting paid tens and thousands of dollars
for a corporate speaking gig.
So having a book doesn't really help much more.
But if I was starting up from scratch,
it probably wouldn't hurt.
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